Chapter Nineteen

The first of Emma's new gowns had been delivered, and as lovely as they had turned out, the enjoyment she might have taken in them had been soured. She fingered the cerulean blue froth of silk that comprised the skirt of one as she tucked it back into its place in the depths of her dressing room. She had intended to bury them there to be forgotten behind the long row of mourning gowns, but the vibrant colors glowed even in the shadows, mocking in their intensity.

What a damned fool she had been. Even her clothing was evidence of her folly; a closetful of gowns to mourn a man who had not deserved it, and a fresh batch to please another who had never truly cared for her. What was wrong with her, that she was so determined to seek love from those incapable of giving it?

It was in moments like these, the silent and still ones that came after the house had settled for the evening, that she felt most haunted. At least Ambrose's ghost had had the courtesy to leave her bedchamber sacrosanct. Now, however, she saw echoes of Rafe everywhere she looked within it. A sorry state of affairs, but there was the hope, however faint, of a brief respite within a glass of brandy.

Her feet carried her down the stairs, and she turned the collar of her dressing gown up against the chill in the air as she headed for the green salon. There were a few hours left before dawn, and she had a sheaf of notes to sort through before she could make another attempt at cracking the cipher.

Neil had left a lamp burning upon the desk, God bless him, and a tray of biscuits and tea. The last week had seen her down in this room for hours after dark, and he had done his best to ensure the time that she spent in her labors had been as pleasant as he could make it—even if he had not even the vaguest sense of what had kept her so occupied.

But the tea would keep a while longer. She snatched the stack of papers from where she had left them within the drawer of the desk, and began to sort through them as she headed for the sideboard near the window.

Rafe's neat handwriting furled across the pages, and she scanned the lines as she poured—and poured—and poured. Too much brandy, to be sure, but then she had a great number of nasty thoughts swimming about her head to banish. The brandy warmed her throat on the way down, but it did not alleviate the ache in her heart.

Another sip, but still she could practically hear his voice in her head as she read from the pages he'd sent over with Dannyboy this morning. Her mind wanted to inflect it with the teasing tenor he'd used with her on occasion, or else the low, raspy murmur that had too often sent chill bumps skittering across her skin.

Pathetic. She set aside the stack of notes aside and rubbed at her eyes, which burned with the sting of unshed tears. At least she had been saved the mortification of having told him the truth of her feelings. Perhaps he had begun to suspect, but she had never told him, and there was some small mercy in that. That she could deny it to him, even if she could not deny it to herself.

The chill of the air grew more pronounced as she stepped away from the light of the fire and closer still to the window, cooling her cheeks which felt hot and flushed with shame. Another sip of brandy, and another. She ought to have buried herself in the necessary work of deconstructing the journal, but the ghosts had not yet gone. She could feel them there, lurking behind her, just out of sight. Like if she turned, she might find Rafe sprawled out upon the couch, already shrugging out of his coat, beckoning her to join him there.

Resolutely, she gazed out the window—and found him there instead. For an impossibly long moment, she thought her tortured mind had conjured him up, placed him out there on the street, half-concealed within the clinging darkness of midnight. Not so close that she could see his face, but then she didn't have to. She recognized well enough the breadth of his shoulders, the curve of his jaw, that sleek, dark hair.

Not her imagination at all. And she had seen him there, in that very spot, once before. She simply hadn't known it at the time. She hadn't known him, then. Weeks ago, she had seen him standing in that exact place.

So had Kit. Dear God—that had been the moment that Kit had decided to send him to her. Her heart gave a painful kick in her chest, racing through a succession of harried beats as a shiver slid down her spine. What had brought him here at this hour of the night? What had caused him to stop just there, some distance away, as if the boundaries of her property constituted an inviolable barrier? Why now, when he hadn't sent so much as a single word to her since that last night?

No. Enough of this. It was not his damned privilege to waft in and out of her life at his leisure, to avoid her in the daylight hours and then to skulk about her house at night. She turned away from the window, downed the rest of her brandy in one long swallow, and discarded the glass as she made for the door.

Her purposeful stride morphed into a run, her slippers skidding across the marble floors. Her dressing gown was hardly an appropriate garment in which to leave the house, but this deep in the night, there was no one about to see it.

Just Rafe. And he'd seen her in less.

A burst of wind swept over her as she turned the lock and threw open the door, the thin fabric of her dressing gown no match for the lingering chill in the air. New buds had begun to sprout upon the naked tree branches for the approach of spring, but still they were bare enough to rattle in the wind above her head as she proceeded through the shelter of them toward the street.

If he had not seen her in the window, then he had certainly seen her emerge from the house. Already he had turned to leave, heading back in the direction he must have come.

"Rafe," she said, her voice roughened with the burn of the brandy she had swallowed. "Rafe."

He stopped, some twenty feet distant from her. Stopped, but did not turn, and his hands flexed at his sides. Still he did not speak.

Her throat ached. Her heart ached. She folded her arms over her chest, and asked, "Why have you come?"

"Go back inside, Emma." The words hardly reached her ears, uttered in a careful monotone. Still he did not face her—did not, or could not? "You need not warn me away; I am going of my own accord. Old habits die hard, it seems." His hands slid into his pockets, and in the cold air his breath emerged in a puff of white. "You will not see me again."

Why did it sound as if he had answered a question she had not asked? Why had he avoided answering the one she had? But she could not force him to explain himself, and he was disinclined to do so. He resumed walking, slow, even strides offering little more than a whisper upon the pavement as he retreated. Her lips pursed against a host of words left unsaid.

The wind whipped at her hair, peeled at the thin fabric of her dressing gown, and chilled the heat of her instinctive ire to be so summarily dismissed. You will not see me again—such a strange turn of phrase. He'd claimed he'd not lied to her, but he was a spy; a master of deception. He could tell a truth and still mislead with it.

She turned, stared at her house, and found the window of the green salon there through the cover of the trees. He'd found here a perfect vantage point; one which provided an adequate view while also offering significant cover. The sort of place one might seek out if one wished to remain unnoticed.

Old habits, he'd said. As if his feet had brought him here against his will. A rote action taken unconsciously. Somewhere in the vicinity of her heart, that ache that had been her constant companion lately turned bittersweet. He had only been watching over her. From a discreet distance, inconspicuous and unobtrusive. And she—she had never once noticed him.

∞∞∞

Saturday—the second in a row Rafe had been summarily refused at Diana's door. His standing invitation to breakfast had been revoked, it seemed. He'd returned to his own house, but had been unable to dredge up any enthusiasm for the simple breakfast that Mrs. Morris had prepared for him out of sheer pity.

The rapid patter of footsteps upon the stairs heralded Dannyboy's return, and Rafe fished in his pocket for his coin purse. The boy had amassed a tidy collection of the coins at this point, though he continued to arrive every day to add to his stockpile.

Mostly, Rafe sent the boy on to Emma's for breakfast, and perhaps a few hours of lessons, which Dannyboy patiently sat through, though Rafe thought he had little interest in actually learning. Occasionally he'd been tasked with carrying a message on to Chris, or sent out on a minor errand that Rafe had devised just to make the lad feel as if he'd earned his coin fairly.

Dannyboy burst into the room without so much as a knock, his expression thunderous—and his face not half so streaked with dirt as it had been when Rafe had sent him on his way perhaps three hours earlier. His clothing, too, had been replaced. Simple garments, not particularly fine, but in much better repair than his own and a sight cleaner. Probably, he thought, they had been scavenged from among whatever garments the boys presently in Emma's care had outgrown.

Peevish and surly, Dannyboy cast himself into a chair, letting his legs dangle as he heaved a longsuffering sigh. Even his ragged shoes had been replaced with good boots, notably lacking holes in the soles.

"Well," Rafe said as he plucked free a half-crown coin from his purse and tossed it to the boy. "You look…clean."

"That nasty woman bathed me," Dannyboy seethed, as if this had been some crime of monumental proportions. "Said I smelled o' the sewer an' I couldn't eat at the table until I'd washed."

An exaggeration, but only a slight one. "Is that all?"

"I told ‘er," the boy snarled, "I ‘ad a bath last month!"

"Yes, well, it's a peculiar habit of the upper classes to bath a bit more regularly than that. But you've got new boots to show for your troubles, and I'll wager you didn't have to pay for them." The old pair had looked their age, and probably his mother had not been willing or able to spare the coin from her meager wages to purchase a new pair for a growing boy.

Dannyboy grumbled as he shoved the coin into his pocket. "Ain't goin' back," he said bitterly. "She can go ‘ang. Even if she ‘as got eggs and bacon."

Rafe guessed that Dannyboy's ill humor would last only so long as the next rumble of his empty stomach, at which point he would swallow his pride and as many rashers of bacon as he could fit upon his plate. "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face," he said. "Is a bath really so much to suffer if it comes with a good breakfast and clothes more suited to the weather? I'll wager you found the journey back less onerous than the journey there." The boy had even been gifted with a wool coat to ward away the chill of winter.

Dannyboy, who plainly did not know the meaning of the word onerous, scowled at him. "It ain't right," he insisted. "I ain't done nuffin' to her!"

"I'm certain it wasn't meant to be a punishment," Rafe said. "Consider, when you're counting out your coins this evening, that you won't have to spend them on a new coat. That your feet will stay dry even in the rain."

"Don't matter," Dannyboy said, and thumped the heel of his new boot against the leg of the chair to punctuate it. "Can't count ‘em anyway."

"You could, if you took your lessons to heart. You've worked hard for your coin; it would be a shame to let yourself be cheated out of it only because you can't count it yourself."

A flicker of indecision pierced the furrow of Dannyboy's brows. "I s'pose," he said in a low, resentful drawl. "But I ain't takin' no more baths."

Rafe shrugged his shoulders in an effort to remain noncommittal. "The occasional bath couldn't hurt," he said. "I'll bet she's got warm water, doesn't she?" He knew damned well she did—just as he knew damned well that Dannyboy had likely had little more than a bucket of cold with which to scrub in the regular course of his life.

Dannyboy pursed his lips into a petulant pout and conceded, "I guess."

"And soap," Rafe said. "Proper bar soap. With a pleasant scent."

"Too flowery," Dannyboy pronounced with a disapproving sniff as he folded his arms over his chest.

"Probably it's a sight more pleasant than having to bathe from a bucket."

"Even so!" Dannyboy erupted, tilting his nose in the air in an undeservedly supercilious manner.

"If you washed your face and hands before you arrived," Rafe suggested, "perhaps you might present a clean enough appearance to spare yourself a bath."

"D'you think?" Dannyboy inquired hopefully.

Not likely. But then, the mere attempt might rid the boy of some of his worst habits—and he might grow accustomed to suffering an occasional bath in the meantime. "It's worth a try, isn't it?" he asked.

"Might as well," Dannyboy allowed, glancing down at his hands, which had been scrubbed clean and free of the dirt that had long been wedged beneath his nails. Then he thrust his hand into his pocket and retrieved a folded note. "She sent this for ye," he said begrudgingly as he passed the note to Rafe. "Said I needn't wait fer a reply."

"Emma sent a note?" He hadn't thought to expect one ever again.

But perhaps she had felt it necessary to make her demands of him clear. He had heard the indignation in her voice a few evenings past, the hurt. He hadn't meant to be caught out, of course, hadn't expected her to come flying out into the night after him. And once she had, he had thought only to spare her his presence.

With no small amount of trepidation, he peeled the paper open. Scanned the lines once, and then again. "Thank you, Dannyboy," he said. "That will be all for today."

"Ye sure, guv?" Dannyboy asked as he popped out of his chair.

"Yes. Quite sure." Emma had summoned him.

∞∞∞

"Were you seen?"

Had Rafe nurtured even the slightest hope that this visit would prove a pleasant one, it was thoroughly vanquished at the sight of Emma's face. She meant, he thought, to project an air of distance. Instead she looked—uncertain. A meager mask of reserve cobbled together over a face strained with hurt, with too many sleepless nights alone with her thoughts. "Yes, I was seen. It's the middle of the day," he said as he eased through the crack in the terrace door she made for him. "But to my knowledge, no one took note of me."

"You're certain?"

"It's my job to know such things." Those he'd passed upon the street had looked at him, of course, in brief glances, the way passersby did. But their gazes had never lingered. No one had followed behind.

Their names would not end up scrawled within the pages of some salacious scandal sheet, linked by some snide suggestion of untoward activities, which was likely her most pressing concern. Even the hint of improprieties might have spelled disastrous consequences for her.

Emma took a steadying breath, as if steeling herself to endure his presence. "The green salon," she said.

It was a long walk toward the appointed room, fraught with the awkwardness that seared the air between them, with the long, uncomfortable silence that was so thick with her hurt and his shame.

She had been working in here, he realized, as he crossed the threshold. A desk had been positioned up against the wall, strewn with scattered papers. Ambrose's journal lay atop it, resting open.

Rafe made a scathing sound deep in his throat, stalking across the room to slam the journal closed, lifting it in his hand. "You do not leave this lying around, open and vulnerable to theft," he said.

The traces of that lingering diffidence fled from Emma's face in the shock of being so reprimanded, and a hot flush of fury suffused her cheeks straight on its heels. "Well, really!" she snapped. "It's safe enough. Kit said so."

"A damned hard won safety, Emma. One I do not expect to last indefinitely, most especially if you're foolish enough to leave such things out in the open where anyone might see them. Gossip spreads quickly, and you do not want to make yourself the subject of it."

"You do not chastise me in my own home!" Emma returned, planting her fists upon her hips, her chin lifting in stubborn challenge. But even her anger was preferable to that mien of grief she had worn.

"I do when you deserve it," Rafe responded. "I don't take you for a fool, so do not behave as one." He thrust the journal in her direction, and she snatched it from his grasp. "Sir Roger would kill to get that from you if he knew the truth of it, and it would not cause him so much as a twinge of distress. I have seen him order such things done."

The color swept from her cheeks in a startling wave, a curious pallor sliding in behind it. Her fingers clenched around the leather binding of the journal, knuckles whitening. The deep blue of her eyes sharpened, her gaze sliding toward the window as if to search out some unseen threat that might even now be lingering without the house. "Do you—do you think he—"

"There is no reason to think so," Rafe conceded, mollified by the reaction. "At present. But it would take a competent thief only a few minutes at most to pick any particular lock. Even I never required a key," he said.

Her jaw tensed as if she had clenched her teeth to bite back some caustic remark. "Then why did you accept one?"

"Because a key might as well be an engraved invitation. It meant my presence within your home was not suspicious, nothing worth remarking on or giving much notice to. That key opened more than your terrace door—it opened every door within your home simply by being in my possession." Rafe let his gaze slide away from Emma's face, which had gone quite bleak at the stony, taciturn words. He'd let himself be provoked into anger, had let himself forget, however briefly, that he was not the injured party here. She had every right to her resentment, and he—he had earned it. "I'm sorry," he said, modulating his voice carefully. "That was unfair of me. Pray tell me for what purpose you have called me here so that I need not inflict my presence upon you any longer than necessary."

Her brows pinched together at the phrasing, but at last she drew in a deep breath and seemed to shake herself that terrible desolation, papering over it with a mien of icy reserve instead. "I don't understand your notes," she said in a crisp, cool tone. "And I should not like to make unnecessary work for myself. It's all rather tedious."

She didn't have to tell him that; he'd spent weeks mired in the tangle of it, doing his damnedest to crack a cipher he well knew to be indecipherable without the corresponding key. Or keys, as it were. "Sit," he said, gesturing to the chair at the desk as he began to sort through the mess she'd made of his notes. Buried beneath the mountain of it, he found at last the ciphering table he'd meticulously printed by hand in tidy rows, encompassing the whole of the page, which he set to the side, atop the rest. "How much do you know of ciphers?"

"Very little," she confessed as she sank into the chair as he had indicated. "I expect that is not so unusual."

It wasn't, but she was going to have to acquire an education in them swiftly if she was to have any chance of breaking it. "Most early ciphers," he said, "eventually became quite simple to break. Perhaps the most famous was a substitution cipher which Caesar employed to pass secret messages during times of war. It was a simple alphabetic shift, replacing the letter to be ciphered with one three letters earlier in the alphabet. ‘D' would therefore become ‘a,' and ‘e' would become ‘b,' and so on, thus rendering the ciphered text unreadable."

"Oh," she said. "That's clever, I suppose."

"It was, but it was also quite easy to break. Even if one did not know the exact number by which to shift the letters, it required at most twenty-five attempts to break it. Eventually, this particular cipher—commonly called the indecipherable cipher—was born. It's been in use for hundreds of years, and still it has proved impossible to break without the key." Rafe snatched up the table he'd drawn up and placed it before her. "This is the tool one uses to cipher the text," he said, gesturing toward the neat rows and columns.

"I have understood that much," she said. "What I do not understand is why. It seems needlessly complex, when it is just the same alphabet spread out over so many rows."

"It's the alphabet offset by one letter per row," he corrected. "And as each letter of the intended message is ciphered separately, it cannot be broken simply by the brute force of shifting the letters. You write out the message to be ciphered, and then select a key—a word, a phrase; anything at all, really. Then you match each letter of the key with each letter of the text to be ciphered, repeating the key as many times as necessary. Where those two letters intersect upon the table, that letter becomes the ciphered text. If—and only if—one has the key can the text be deciphered in the reverse."

"This is an exercise in futility," Emma said, rubbing at her eyes as if to soothe away a headache. Probably, given the state of the salon, she'd been attempting to sort through his notes for some time now, wasting as many hours upon the venture as had he. "Even with the proper key, it could take days—weeks, perhaps—to decipher the whole of the journal."

"Yes. I've worked on it for weeks, with no success," he said, rummaging through the scattered pages strewn across the surface of the desk. "Countless hours of work."

"Wasted, it seems."

"Not wasted." A ragged laughed eked from his throat. "My God," he said, with a slow shake of his head. "You can be forgiven for your ignorance, since you lack the proper context to understand it. This effort is never wasted, Emma. Lives have been saved by such work. Lives have been lost over it, as well. As distasteful a thing as you may find it, people like me do work such as this so that people like you can sleep soundly at night. I might have dirtied my hands in the doing, but I was willing to make that sacrifice if others might be spared the ugliness of it." A blight upon his conscience to save hers, and others like her.

He heard the soft inhale, the scrape of her breath in her throat, as if it had gone a bit too tight for comfort, but he did not bother to turn to see if she had taken offense. Instead he stacked the loose pages into some semblance of order, waiting for her to fill the uncomfortable silence that had fallen between them.

And she did. They always did. "I hate knowing," she admitted in a hoarse rasp. "Every bit as much as I hate having been lied to for so many years. I can't quite make myself decide which is worse." A hollow, toneless laugh followed. "Ignorance is bliss, I suppose."

"‘Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise,'" he corrected. "I imagine many would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of such things, did they have to face the consequences of knowing them."

"Consequences," she murmured reflectively. "Yes. It is a sort of hell to have so much to say and no one at all whom I can tell." And then, after a moment of hesitation, she inquired, "Does your family know?"

"No. They never have. They never will. Out of necessity, it is a burden borne alone." One he had now given to her, a restriction which he well knew would chafe.

"To whom do you speak of such things?"

"No one. It is the way of these things. There are things I can never speak of, things I can never admit that I know. I must always guard my words, mind my actions, and even modulate my expressions lest I inadvertently reveal something best concealed. I do not enjoy lying, Emma, and I make every effort to evade a deliberate untruth whenever it is possible. I deflect and dodge to avoid it when I can. But it is occasionally a necessary evil. It has saved my life on more than one occasion."

"Why do you do it, then?" she asked, and he did not think she meant only lying.

"Because someone has got to," he said. "And because I am good at it. I have always been the invisible son. Only the spare, of no particular importance. I was always going to have to find a vocation for myself. I leveraged my strengths to serve my country better than I might have done as only a soldier. I am genial, but unobtrusive. Refined, but unremarkable. I can blend seamlessly with a crowd and avoid attention. I am not noticed in the way others would be. I was made for this role, born to it. Even you have not noticed me."

"That's hardly fair," Emma said sharply, her voice tight with offense. "You've gone out of your way to avoid me."

"I've gone out of my way to avoid an introduction," he corrected. "But really, it wasn't so very difficult a thing to do. We've attended many of the same events over the years." Though he had never risked getting close to her. "You might have recognized me that first evening, if you had ever truly looked at me before. But you never have." Rafe gave a short sigh, his lips flattening into a grim line. "I don't hold it against you," he said. "You weren't meant to notice me. No one else ever has."

"I'm sorry for that," Emma said, and there was a hint of fragility within the delicate tones. Not an overture, he didn't think—he had trespassed too far for such a thing. But she was still a lady, with a lady's sensibilities. Of course she would feel some manner of sympathy.

Selecting a few pages from the stack, he extended them to her. "Here's what I've already attempted as possible keys. They yielded no intelligible results, so you need not waste your time on them. Names, titles of books—anything you've mentioned in passing that I thought might merit an attempt."

Emma took possession of the papers, with a curious, inscrutable expression etched upon her features. "And the numbers?" she asked. "The ones shaded into the margins of the pages? What do they mean?"

"I haven't the faintest. They're out of order, and there's numbers missing from them. My best guess," he said, "is that they correspond to something as yet unknown. It's my belief that Ambrose used multiple keys, and the numbers hidden in the margins were meant to remind himself of which key he had used for each entry."

"He'd have needed a list of them, then, wouldn't he?"

Rafe shrugged. "Possibly. But a list would be a dangerous thing to keep on hand, since it could not easily be explained if discovered. I think it a more likely possibility by far that it is something innocuous, something he could keep easily within reach, and which would not attract suspicion. Likely a page from a book, or lines upon a particular page. If he wrote down the numbers, it's nearly a certainty that he had not committed the keys themselves to memory. Anything you can remember of him may prove useful there." Ambrose's study had been filled with books. There was no telling which of them might yield the key.

"I didn't know him," she said, in a stilted monotone. "I didn't know him at all. I fear I shall fare no better than you."

"Then we are no worse off than we already were." It wasn't her responsibility, though she had taken it on. The failure had been his. She had only been the one to suffer for it. "Emma–"

"I would have given it to you," she said in a fragile little voice, bending her head as if the admission shamed her. "If you had asked. If Kit had asked. I would have given the journal to you."

He heard the subtext within the brittle words: You never had to deceive me. You never had to break my heart. But still they would have had to tell her the whole of it. To shatter her illusions of what her husband had been, what her marriage had been. They would have had to reveal secrets of state, betray the oaths they had taken to king and country.

"We couldn't tell you," he said. "It is the nature of such things. In point of fact, we should not have told you what we have."

"But you did."

"Sir Roger's involvement has changed things." So had her feelings—and his own. "Emma, I never wanted to hurt you. I am so damned sorry for it. For all of it." He had never thought there had been even the slightest chance of capturing her heart. Never imagined it would be within his power to break it.

"Please don't," she said softly, and the bleak devastation in her voice tore at his heart. "I have been humiliated quite enough for one lifetime. I do realize now how foolish I have been, how easily mislead. Kindly spare me the patronization of suggesting otherwise."

His jaw ached with the effort to hold back the words she did not want to hear, words she would not believe did he dare to speak them. He could not make her believe them, believe him. She had been deceived too often already ever to hear the truth of it.

He had killed whatever love she might once have held for him. His own would only be another burden to her now. This was the last kindness he could do for her: to refrain from uttering those words which she would not believe anything other than yet another deception.

"What do you want of me, Emma?" he asked, distantly aware of the raspy tenor of his voice.

Her sigh trembled in the air, heavy with the same melancholy that pressed her shoulders down into a dejected slump. "Nothing," she said. "Nothing at all."

He'd expected as much, but still the words cut deeper than any knife could have done. That much, at least, he could offer her. He'd been doing it for years already. "Then you shall have it," he said as he turned for the door. His absence would, he hoped, restore the peace he'd stolen from her. "You'll never have to see me again."